I’ve switched from my two three years old dedicated servers to one brand new virtual server. Reasons are : These servers costed me too much and they were becoming old (risk of failure increases). It wasn’t worth it.
I spent last night doing that because I didn’t want to interrupt anybody using these servers.
My two servers were running some Debian and I’m now switching to a CentOS virtual server. I was a little bit worried at first that CentOS would have a crappy package management system, but its yum is in fact working the same way as Debian’s apt-get and OpenSuse’s zypper. The oool thing is that these three package management systems roughly work the same way : <apt-get/yum/zypper> install , you don’t have to learn a new “ultimate” way to upgrade your software (like on FreeBSD). By the way, the faster package management system is yum, and the slowest one is zypper.
The biggest problem I had so far was to move all the databases. Previously, I was always using some Debian hosts, I was using exactly the same version of MySQL, so I just had to copy the MySQL datadir and logs files. Here, I had to export/import everything.
CentOS has an antique 1.2.4 version of Mono (when the current version is 2.4). I couldn’t manage to compile from the tarball but compiling from the SVN worked fine.
$ /usr/local/bin/mono --version
Mono JIT compiler version 2.5 (/trunk/mono r140917 Sat Aug 29 05:29:19 CEST 2009)
Copyright (C) 2002-2008 Novell, Inc and Contributors. www.mono-project.com
TLS: __thread
GC: Included Boehm (with typed GC and Parallel Mark)
SIGSEGV: altstack
Notifications: epoll
Architecture: amd64
Disabled: none